It's in the Bag...!

Join us this coming Thursday, April 22nd for Roscoe Village's Spring Goodie Bag Shopping Event: "It's in the Bag" from 5-9pm. Receive free gifts with your purchases from the shops listed above plus mystery envelopes filled with fabulous savings certificates from our Roscoe Street restaurants, spas, photography and more!

Enjoy wine and cheese in my studio while you shop and get first dibs on new spring paintings before I take them on the road to Kansas City for my first Art Fair of the season, The Brookside Art Annual!

The Adventure Continues....

I alluded to some news awhile back, here it is: On April 1st I get the keys to my new studio storefront at 2040 West Roscoe, in the Roscoe Village neighborhood of Chicago! I have been talking about making this move for quite awhile, back in January the stars aligned and I learned that the perfect spot would soon be available only 1.5 miles from our house in a lovely neighborhood surrounded by shops and restaurants and other businesses. This space has been the home of Sacred Art for almost 3 years, Sarah is moving her store to Lincoln Square so it's only fitting that we keep art in this location. It has a tree and a park bench right outside the door. I mocked up this photo I found on-line as a vision board exercise while I waited to see if my offer would be accepted, and it worked! (A tool my good friend Eva May used to seal the deal with her storefront on Ashland back in 2007).

I'll be using future blog posts to show the progress and to get your advice and feedback on things I'd like to do with the space, I hope to be open for business by mid-April. In the meantime, being the sentimental gal that I am, I did a video tour of my work space here at home (2 weeks ago) so you could see it before I took all the paintings down for my show in Cedarburg. Please excuse my 'and's and 'um's and jerky camera, it's so hard to hear my own voice but I decided to get over it and share with you.

Crunch Time...

Picture 17

Phew...after we loaded the truck, I came in and finished 2 more paintings...this is a close up of a tiny portion of one of them. We hit the road tomorrow morning for the

Prairie Village Art Fair

this weekend in Kansas City. I've been in SUPER ANNE mode which is neccessary to produce my

Newsletter

before heading out of town and pull everything together for the first show of the season: (getting my booth display and equipment all back together, packing

paintings, figuring out what stays and what goes and how to hang it.

Making price tags, getting portfolios, credit card machine, receipt

books, mailing list, bags, weights, and my brand new front

Awning

  for

my Tent....woo hoo: additional shade!). 

It's almost a relief to just focus on one part of my business for a week....I've always felt that if I just chose one direction I could be really successful (and probably more sane) but for some reason I feel the need to be involved in all these different facets of art: the Art Fairs, Pet Portraits, Illustration, Licensing, Wholesale, my Design work for Animal Welfare Groups...did I forget anything? Some day I would love to have a business manager that facilitates all that 'stuff' so I could just do the creative part...know anyone like that?

Picture 20

Also edited and uploaded another video clip - this one is of me painting a recent pet portrait of Dudley & Murphy (above) for Stacy of ZuZuPetals. You can watch it on my Pet Portrait Blog. 

It's actually easier to upload video to Blogger than to Typepad...go figure.

Thursday in the studio...live

As I mentioned the other day, I've been using Gawker to capture my live painting sessions in the studio....the hard part is the editing with imovie and then getting all of that to show up here, Typepad had good instructions. Kate and Rich and of course Lynda.com have both taught me a lot...I'm using Viddler.com to host the video. So here goes the first one: Music: "Run On" by Moby from Play:The B Sides